At 18?

Very few people know I’m 17. Even less know I’ll be 18 tomorrow. Will it feel different? Will I automatically shed my recluse persona and ask my first girl out? Will there be a sense of accomplishment at having crossed that silly invisible line? Honestly I don’t know.

My schedule tomorrow will probably be the same — wake up, run to class, return, do some coding and go to bed, without feeling any different.

Lest I forget, my former roommate Brett turned 20 on Thursday. I was supposed to leave a card for him but he’d already gone home for the festivities. With my family not here, I can be assured no fuss will be made about me, and my birthday’ll pass just the way I like it — silently.

Up Pinays!

I saw this Reuters article and couldn’t resist poking some fun at Leegaya. Perhaps this is why she’s so weird.

In other news, if this rumor about another aircrash in Nigeria is true, I wonder where the future of our aviation industry lies.

Tagged — Again?

FOUR JOBS YOU’VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE

  1. CyberCafe Attendant
  2. Web and Software Developer
  3. Computer Lab Attendant, MSU Library
  4. Freelance web developer

FOUR JOBS YOU WISH YOU HAD

  1. Internet surfer
  2. Getting to try out the fastest computers — and keeping them
  3. Sleeper
  4. Misogynist

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER AGAIN

  1. Drunken Master II
  2. Wing Chun
  3. Mr Bones
  4. Ukwa

FOUR CITIES YOU’VE LIVED IN

  1. Ajaokuta
  2. Port Harcourt
  3. Suleja
  4. Beckley

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH

  1. I don’t watch TV.

FOUR PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATIONHOLIDAY/TRAVELLED TO

  1. Ashaka
  2. Abuja
  3. Lagos (Mile 2, Surulere, Ikotun)
  4. Tampa, FL

FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY

  1. Google
  2. PHPFreaks
  3. Wikipedia
  4. Various blogs…

FOUR OF YOUR FAVOURITE FOODS

  1. Starch, banga soup, fresh fish
  2. Fried rice
  3. Pounded yam (iyan), egusi soup, goat meat
  4. Cheese steak sandwich

FOUR THINGS YOU WON’T EAT

  1. 404
  2. Cats
  3. Alchohol
  4. Vera’s eye

FOUR THINGS YOU WISH YOU COULD EAT OR DRINK RIGHT NOW

  1. Liver
  2. Suya
  3. Yam pottage
  4. Cheese steak sandwich

FOUR THINGS IN YOUR BEDROOM

  1. My baby
  2. Bed
  3. My nice roommate
  4. Me

FOUR THINGS YOU WISH YOU HAD IN YOUR BEDROOM

  1. A Pentium M Dell I’ve been coveting
  2. My younger brother
  3. No roommate
  4. Her…

FOUR THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW

  1. Headphones
  2. One of those expensive-looking wristwatches. It cost me just $6 without tax.
  3. Black jeans
  4. A severe expression

FOUR PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW

  1. Port Harcourt
  2. MIT

FOUR FICTIONAL PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW

  1. The Matrix
  2. Tom Clancy’s Ryaniverse

FOUR PEOPLE YOU’D REALLY LOVE TO HAVE DINNER WITH

  1. My family
  2. Her…
  3. My (few) friends here
  4. Blogger pals

FOUR THINGS YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW

  1. How ever did I ever get strongarmed into doing this?
  2. I’m glad the designer was delighted with the PSD-XHTML conversion I made two days ago
  3. I’m sitting here doing this instead of trying to deliver an overdue project
  4. I’ll soon be done

FOUR OF YOUR FAVOURITE THINGS/PEOPLE

  1. My family
  2. Jackie Chan
  3. My books

FOUR PEOPLE TO TAG

  1. Leegaya
  2. Gbenga

The rest’ve already been tagged :(.

Yansh

For want of something better to do today, I was looking over my site statistics, analyzing the search engine keywords used, etc. Due to my woes with eMachines and w3107 drivers [this model isn’t listed on their site so I get a lot of the hits that would have been theirs], it was natural that I should be getting hits pertaining the system. Naturally, ‘Azuka’ was one of the top hits.

Going down, I began to see strange search results that actually got in, the most annoying of which was ‘yansh.’ Now, I don’t think I’ve ever said that word — at least not since I was five — so I wondered where that turned up in my posts. Here’s the culprit post, and as you can see I didn’t even say it.

Here’re some of the strange results:

  • how much do azuka books cost
  • oloshi nigeria
  • the holy azuka
  • azuka omo

The funny things people search for…

Working

I’ve already mocked up a design for Authware and tweaked the database layer — I was able to communicate successfully with PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server. Hopefully, any other developer interested should be able to write a layer for mySQLite or some other obscure database. I used PHP 5’s Interface feature — the classes only have to implement it. I only have to work on the admin area and the different modules — it’s going to be tougher this time because I’m using pluggable functions like WordPress, a detailed permissions system, and perhaps XML-RPC.

I’ve been spending a while working with PHPBB3 Olympus, working on some obscure site for some [rich] clients (you may take this tongue-in-cheek). Without Zend Studio to help me explore the code, I daresay I’d have been truly doomed. What confounds me now is duplicating the registration and login codes to work out of the PHPBB concept without lumping together all the core PHPBB code together. So far, I’ve been chasing my tail running through myriads of functions that each make their contribution the the complexity of the code. The annoying thing is that since it’s in beta, there’s no code documentation — I have to make guesses and keep trying. What’s that joke — the last thing a coder wants to do is code.

Flex looks like one of those necessary evils — I remember PHP was when I had to give up ASP and recode a crazy site entirely in PHP. Ikezi’s been bombarding me with Flex UIs to no end but I guess what finally did the trick was Ms Dewey. Talk about a pretty girlish yet sophisticated bot who pouts and winks to no end at you, or looks out of the corner of her eye while doing something silly. As a search engine, it fails — as a seductive marketing ploy, well…

Stress

I must have one of the worst techniques of dealing with stress the world over.

I can deal with problems when they come singly, but when they decide to come in droves, I just shut down. There’s the speech I have to give on Tuesday, i55.org which ought to have been completed by now, an external PHPBB authentication system which I’m supposed to get done before the month ends [I’ve been running around interlinking functions within Zend Studio until I wanted to tear my hair out], not to forget the code overhaul of my writing site. As if someone out there decided this was my time of tribulation, after my interview with Adeolu Akinyemi, my inbox’s been besieged with emails from people who want me to help them out or work for them. I haven’t even touched on my thoughts of transferring to MIT or some other school, have I or that my friend Ikezi has for some reason been using this period to evangelize Flex?

Hemmed in on all sides, what do I do?

Nothing.

I’ve been doing a great deal of sleeping lately, remaining invisible on YM so my client won’t see me. I’m sure he’s worried, but so am I, especially now that he has three jobs for me. I’m dealing on one hand with a CSS glitch which may or may not threaten other browsers, a very nit-picky designer, and finally a site I’m supposed to design and code. Everytime I log in to the site, I take just one look at what needs to be done and chicken out. Now it’s not the money that matters to me, but how to withdraw honourably without drawing blood — the man puts too much faith in me already.

You can understand then, Sister Overwhelmed, Mari, Calabargal and Queenzy that this Four Meme’s thing going around is just another wahala I’d rather do without.